The convergence of Lean manufacturing and Industry 4.0 requires digital infrastructures capable of transforming high-frequency telemetry into actionable insights. However, architectures that integrate near real-time data with closed-loop process control remain scarce, particularly in the food-processing industry. This study proposes a “Lean 4.0” framework based on a six-layer Digital Twin (DT) architecture to digitise waste detection and optimise a medium-scale bakery. The methodology integrates a heterogeneous Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) network comprising 17 ESP32 (Espressif Systems, Shanghai, China)-based monitoring nodes. Data collection is managed via an edge-centric MQTT–InfluxDB (version 2.7, InfluxData, San Francisco, CA, USA) data pipeline. Furthermore, the analytics layer employs discrete-event simulation in Siemens Plant Simulation (version 2302, Siemens Digital Industries Software, Plano, TX, USA), constraint programming with Google OR-Tools (version 9.8, Google LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA), and machine learning models (Isolation Forest and SARIMA). Multi-month validation in a brownfield bakery, including a 60-day continuous monitoring test, demonstrated that the proposed architecture reduced production cycle time by 24.4% and inter-operational waiting time by 51.2%. Moreover, manual planning time decreased by 87.4% through the use of low-code scheduling interfaces. In addition, state-based control of critical ovens reduced energy consumption by 23.06%. These findings indicate that combining deterministic simulation and combinatorial optimisation with data-driven analytics provides a scalable blueprint for implementing cyber-physical systems in food-processing SMEs. This approach effectively bridges the gap between traditional Lean principles and data-driven smart manufacturing.
Amirkhanova et al. (2026) studied this question.